“How can you say that? We’d get out of this hell hole.”
“Yes. And you would probably put yourself in more danger by doing so. And you’d endanger us as well.”
“How so?”
“You’d be two defenseless women, with no weapons, at the mercy of whoever wandered along.
“Remember, these men aren’t the end of it. Remember Swain and his bunch? They were even worse. And Swain told us there were over three hundred men who escaped from Leavenworth.
“Most of them are still close by, because they had no vehicles to escape with. They’re still in the area, still looking for somebody to abuse, still looking for somebody to take advantage of.”
“Aunt Karen, are you suggesting that we stay here?”
“I’m suggesting that sometimes the known, as bad as it is, can be better than the unknown.
“You and Kara might get out and make it to my place. Maybe they won’t go looking for you because they’ll think it’s too dangerous. Maybe you can survive there on your own and nobody else will come along and bother you.
“But maybe, just maybe, you’ll be jumping from the frying pan right into the fire.
“Maybe you’ll get to my place to find out there’s already someone else there.
“Maybe another group of bad guys came along and found the place empty and started squatting there.
“Maybe this bunch is worse than the men we’re staying with now. Maybe they’re more brutal.
“Maybe they don’t care that you’re only seventeen. Maybe they’ll figure they can rape you as well as Kara. At least now neither of you are being assaulted day in and day out.”
“I hear what you’re saying, Aunt Karen. And maybe you’re right. I just don’t know what to do.”
“There’s something else, isn’t there, Lind?”
“What do you mean?”
“Honey, I’ve known you for a very long time. I used to change your diapers. I baby sat you when you were teething and I wanted to slap you silly.
“When you know someone as well as I know you, you can tell when they’re holding out on you.
“And I can tell you’re holding something back. What is it?”
“I… I just…”
“Honey I can’t help you if I don’t know what it is.”
“I want to get away from my mom.”
“I suspected as much.”
“It’s just that…”
“Wait, Lind. Let me see if I can guess.
“You’re furious with your mother because she’s cheating on your father and having an affair with John Parker.
“Well, welcome to the club because I am too.
“You’re so angry with her you can’t stand the sight of her and want to get away from her.
“I can’t blame you for that either.
“But let me tell you something you probably haven’t considered.
“Right or wrong, your mother is still your mother.
“Maybe she has a reason for messing around with Parker. I can’t for the life of me imagine what it might be, but maybe she has one.
“Let’s just say for the sake of argument she’s turned herself into a shameless hussy.
“Even if that’s the case, that in itself is not a capital crime. It may be immoral, and it may be incredibly unfair to your father and for you and Beth. But it doesn’t warrant the death penalty.”
Lindsey looked at her. She didn’t understand what Karen was driving at.
“If you and Kara disappear, these men will almost certainly get angry.
“It’s hard to say how angry they’ll get, or which direction they’ll turn to channel that anger.
“Maybe Parker can control their anger, and maybe he can’t.
“You don’t know this, but they’ve been lobbying Parker to let them start passing Kara around for their sexual pleasure.
“With the two of you gone that’ll cease to be a possibility.
“They may lash out by raping your mother and me.
“And we’d survive if that happened. The human spirit can take an awful lot of abuse. We’d suffer mightily, and we might want to die. But we’d get through it and we’d survive.
“But here’s the thing…
“These men are as unpredictable as any group of men I’ve ever seen.
“Who’s to say they’d settle for raping your mother and me? They might be angry enough to just beat us instead.
“And sometimes men like this will start beating a woman and won’t stop until their victim is no longer moving.
“Can you live with yourself if you and Kara leave and these men go into a rage and beat your mother to death as punishment for your leaving?
“I’m not trying to stop you from goin’ honey. I’m really not. But before you take that step you have to understand and accept that there may be unintended consequences.”
Chapter 42
Almost exactly a thousand miles away, in a San Antonio suburb, Ronald Martinez planted his feet and hurled a rock, just as he once hurled a softball from center field to second base.
This wasn’t a softball, though it was about the same size.
It was a lot heavier too, and no way could it be mistaken for something soft.
It flew true, right through the plate glass window on the front of Dave and Spear’s house.
The phony eviction notice which had adorned the glass for way more than a year fell to the ground, surrounded by shards of glass.
Napping birds in the oak tree above Ronald’s head suddenly took off in flight as the stillness of the night was shattered with the glass.
Ronald immediately took up a firing stance behind the tree, the barrel of his gun aimed within the bowels of the house.
He was waiting for the closed door to the empty room to burst open, Dave suddenly appearing and cursing a blue streak as he raked the front yard with bullets.
Or perhaps an upstairs window would open and death would come raining from above.
Maybe a head would appear above the screw-fortified privacy fence and start firing.
Maybe from both sides of the house at the same time.
Ronald wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But he considered himself ready for whatever the response to his rock was.
It turned out he wasn’t ready at all.
Because as it happened… nothing happened.
The door didn’t burst open. The upstairs windows remained closed.
There was no movement from the back yard.
Or anywhere else, for that matter.
The quiet returned.
Even the birds came back.
Now Ronald was in a pickle.
He’d announced his presence. If they weren’t watching him with their hidden surveillance camera or by peeking through a pinhole in the blacked out upstairs windows before, they might not have known he was there.
Now they certainly knew.
So did the rest of the neighborhood, for that matter.
He didn’t much worry about the neighbors getting involved.
They wouldn’t come to Dave Spear’s aid.
In the new world people minded their own business.
Shattering the front window surely woke some people up, no doubt.
But it was better than even odds no one would come outside to investigate.
No one would peek out their windows into the dark night to try to figure out who broke a window and why.
No, anyone who was awakened from a sound sleep by the shattering glass would likely do a walk around of their own house’s interior to make sure it wasn’t their window which was shattered.
Then they’d likely go back to bed, hugging their rifle or their pistol in case their house was next.
So no one would interfere with Ronald’s plan.
The problem was Ronald didn’t know what his plan was, exactly.
Surely the people inside were armed to the teeth and at the ready.
Surely they expected a full-out frontal assault
from whoever had just shattered their front window. For unless they planned to assault the house, what was the point in taking such an action?
Dave Spear’s obvious game plan was to simply wait until the aggressor or aggressors came into the house and started rummaging around, and then open fire upon them.
Shoot first, clean up the bloody mess later, as it were.
Given that, they were at a bit of a standoff.
Ronald assumed they weren’t going to take action until he invaded their property.
And he damn sure wasn’t going to invade their property knowing they were lying in wait for him.
He waited a full ten minutes.
Nothing.
Still no movement. No sound, either.
These guys were good. But of course, they were trained by a former Marine.
Finally he picked up another rock. This one was just a tad bit smaller than the first.
He stepped out from behind the tree just long enough to send it sailing through the shattered window. It went through the empty room and hit hard against the closed door which separated the room from the rest of the house.
Even before the sound stopped echoing he was back behind the tree, back to holding his rifle and ready to fire at the first sign of movement within the house.
And, of course, there was none.
Ten more minutes went by.
Ten more agonizingly slow minutes.
It was at that point Ronald’s paranoia started to act up just a bit.
He got a bit skittish.
It occurred to him that Dave Spear had plenty of time to sneak out his back door, hop a few fences to get half a block away, then to use the darkness to sneak up behind Ronald.
Ronald expected a shot to the back of the head at any moment.
To hell with this.
He fired two of his six remaining rounds. One into the wall on each side of that closed door.
He knew that the bullets would travel through several walls, and would probably have enough power to exit out the back of the house.
He also knew that whoever was hiding behind those walls would be spurred into action.
For there is no better motivator than being shot at.
But again, nothing happened.
And he finally realized the house was just what it seemed: vacant and devoid of human life.
Chapter 43
Ronald knew he was taking a risk as he climbed through the shattered plate glass window frame and onto the carpeted floor of the Spear house.
But it was a calculated move, in that he’d tried to determine his odds of being shot before he took such action.
By his calculations, the odds were in his favor.
For if someone had been in the house when bullets started coming through the walls at them, surely they’d have responded.
Not to have done so would have been akin to begging to die. For the next bullet coming through that wall might well pass through them as well.
No, in Ronald’s mind there were two options left.
Either the entire Spear family was below ground in the house’s basement.
Or they were long gone.
If they were in the basement, all Ron had to do was barricade the basement door, then go out the back door to make sure there were no basement windows which opened into the back yard.
If there were, he’d block them too, effectively locking the Spears in a cage from which they’d never leave.
It would, in essence, become their tomb.
On the other hand if they’d evacuated the place and he had it all to himself, he could search and loot it at his leisure.
Either way he was confident, as he crept through the front room toward the mysterious closed door, that he’d be the victor in the battle for the house.
And if he somehow miscalculated, the worst that could happen was they’d blow him away.
And then he’d finally taste the sweet peace of death.
As he reached the closed door and grasped the knob, it occurred to him there was another possibility.
He already knew Dave Spear employed booby traps to help protect his home. The screws in the top of the fence was the most obvious example.
What if the door was attached to a break wire? What if there was a Claymore mine screwed to the wall on the other side of the door that would explode when he opened it?
In the darkness, he couldn’t see whether the door opened into the room he was in, or opened outward.
He felt with his fingers and determined the door was on his side of the door jamb. It would open toward him.
There was no break wire on the other side of the door for the door to sever as it opened.
He was just letting his paranoia run away with him.
He tenderly turned the knob and pulled the door open.
Nothing happened.
He went to his hands and knees and carefully reached out into the darkness, about ankle high.
This time he was looking for a trip wire, strung across the hallway, to set off that same Claymore mine.
Nothing.
Inch by inch he crawled the entire length of the hallway, searching for wires in the darkness.
Finally, the hallway opened up into what appeared to be a great room or den.
It was too dark to see anything. The moonlight coming through the shattered window didn’t penetrate this far into the house.
The windows appeared to be covered by heavy drapes, their blinds closed.
His pupils had dilated as much as they were going to. Waiting any longer wouldn’t make it easier to see.
Now he had a critical decision to make.
He could keep going until he bumped into a wall, then follow the wall to the nearest window and shed it of its curtains and open its blinds.
That should give him enough moonlight to advance to the next window. And each window he shed of its covers the better he’d be able to see in the room.
Of course, each inch he traveled in this room would increase the likelihood he’d stumble upon a booby trap and be blown to pieces.
His other option was to pull the cigarette lighter out of his pocket, hold it up, and light up the room. Or at least as well as he could with a small flame.
The danger in that was the possibility Dave Spear had no working night vision goggles after all.
And that maybe he was sitting in the dark waiting for a target to shoot at.
Chapter 44
It was a tough decision to make.
If Ronald sparked a flame close to his head Dave would have his target, and lighting that flame would likely be the last thing Ronald did.
A man gets a lot braver when he doesn’t really care whether he lives or dies.
It’s true on the battlefield, where it often makes heroes of ordinary men.
And it’s also true in Dave Spear’s house in San Antonio, Texas.
Ronald dug out his lighter, held it high over his head, and sparked the flame.
The room seemed devoid of life, other than Ronald’s trembling body.
He could make out only one thing that concerned him: a very large plywood enclosure built against one wall of the room.
He moved closer to investigate it.
It was Dave’s safe room. He’d built it when winter set in a few months after the world went black, when heating his entire house wasn’t an option.
On one wall of the enclosure was Dave’s fireplace, which he burned at night to keep himself from freezing to death.
Since most looters and marauders operated in the hours of darkness Dave stayed up all night, reading and meditating in front of his fire and listening for sounds which might indicate there was trouble afoot.
During the daylight hours, when it tended to be a bit less cold, he crawled into his double-winter sleeping bags and slept the day away.
Ronald inspected the walls and ceiling of the safe room and saw they were made of several sheets of plywood and were well over an inch thick.
He wondered
whether that was to make the room bulletproof in the event Dave came under attack, or to help insulate it so it the small fireplace kept it warmer on frigid nights.
Actually, Dave designed it for both: a well-insulated place to spend most of his time that would stop most high-powered bullets.
Ronald’s lighter kept overheating and burning his thumb, and he kept having to switch it from one hand to the other.
Then he found several oil lanterns in the corner of the den and lit one of them.
It took him a full half-hour to find the basement door.
Dave had bolted the back of a bookcase to it, then filled the bookcase with books to hide the bolts.
The bookcase was elevated just high enough to swing open without disturbing the carpet beneath it.
Ronald was impressed. That part was brilliant, for a crushed arc-shape impression on the carpet in front of the bookcase would have been a dead giveaway there was a door behind it.
Ronald pulled the bookcase out of the way and fired his last four rounds into the doorway and down the basement steps.
Once again there was no movement.
No return fire.
No one shouting out in surrender.
He finally breathed a sigh of relief.
There was no one else there. The house was his.
All his.
He finally allowed himself to smile.
He went back to that mysterious door which led from the empty front room and into the rest of the house and closed it.
Then he began a thorough search, using the oil lantern to provide all the light he needed, and went from room to room.
In the basement he found over two hundred cases of drinking water, lining every wall. He assumed Dave stacked his water in such a manner not only for added insulation against the winter cold, but to keep it out of the way.
He also found several cases of water bottles marked with an “R” that were a couple of shades darker than the unopened drinking water.
He assumed it was rainwater which had been collected and then boiled for drinking.
Dave was a very smart man. Most people would have used all their bottled water first, then started collecting rainwater.
By drinking rainwater when it was available, Dave made his stores of unopened bottled water last several times longer.
A Stunning Betrayal Page 14